Blanton Named Director of CSSI

Professor of ECE Shawn Blanton is the new director of the Center for Silicon System Implementation (CSSI). Blanton succeeds Larry Pileggi, Tanoto Professor of ECE, who served as director since 2000.

CSSI is focused on all aspects of chip design spanning the spectrum from system-level architectures to analog/digital circuits, to the physics and the modeling of the complexities found in semiconductor manufacturing.

Blanton joined the Carnegie Mellon faculty in 1995 after earning a doctorate in computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan. In 2006, he was awarded an Emerald Award for outstanding leadership in recruiting and mentoring minorities for advanced degrees in science and technology. The Emerald Awards, sponsored by Science Spectrum magazine, are recognized as the premier awards for African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans and Native Americans working in the research sciences.

Blanton is the leader of the Carnegie Mellon Laboratory on Integrated Systems Test, which uses the physical design description of integrated circuits to identify and characterize defects. Research results from his lab are currently being employed by companies that include Intel and IBM, and currently being commercialized in the Carnegie Mellon spin-out TestWorks.

CSSI has 18 participating faculty from the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering, and over 60 graduate students.

CSSI was formed in 2000 upon the infrastructure of the Center for Electronic Design Automation (CEDA) which grew out of the emiconductor Research Corporation-Carnegie Mellon Research Center for Computer-Aided Design founded in 1982.

In his role as director of CSSI, Pileggi re-focused the center on silicon system design and optimization. This led to the center's participation in two FCRP-funded multi-university research centers: The Center for Circuit & System Solutions (C2S2) and The Gigascale Systems Research Center (GSRC). In addition, the CSSI is supported by DARPA, NSF and industry.

Dr. Shawn Blanton has been named the new director of the Center for Silicon System Implementation (CSSI).